Calendar connections: update

Being able to connect one’s calendar to Doodle is a great feature–and one we recently invested into making faster and more reliable. It works best with Google Calendar (both via individual Google accounts and via Doodle’s Google Apps integration), but our goal is to also play well with Apple and Microsoft.

Until there are calendar APIs for Apple’s iCloud and Microsoft’s Office 365, we want to provide Doodle connectors for iCal and for Outlook. The iCal connector already works reasonably well even though it is still in beta. While the Outlook connector also works well for the majority of its users, it does not work well at all for a large minority of its users. And in the case of the Doodle’s Exchange integration, the situation is even worse: it kind of works for a small minority and does not work at all for a large majority.

We apologize for this unsatisfactory state of affairs and are going to remedy it as follows:

The Exchange integration is going to be discontinued (by May 2nd) in order not to eat up more precious time that is better spent on Google Calendar, iCal, and Outlook.

The Doodle connector API is going to be modified according to the actual use of the Outlook connector. One important reason for the problems that the large minority of Outlook connector users experience is that some of the assumptions that we had made for Doodle’s connector API turned out to be wrong.

We try to outsource the maintenance of the iCal connector and the Outlook connector. We have developed them ourselves in order to verify (and, as it turned out, falsify) the Doodle connector API, but we are experts in Java and Web development and not in Mac or Windows development.

If you are a Google Calendar user, all is good. If you are an iCal user, keep updating the Doodle connector as it is maturing. And if you are an Outlook user, please remain patient (we realise that you have been patient with us already!): the Doodle connector API in general and the Outlook connector in particular are slowly but steadily going to improve over the next weeks and months.